Google Ad Innovations was launched at the end of March as a lab for ad products it is considering. It’s designed to help AdWords account holders experiment with ad technologies and get their feedback about the new products. They may or may not be released for real in the future, depending on how they test out among AdWords users.

Search Funnels was launched a couple of weeks ago. It slices and dices your search, conversion, keyword, and number of steps preceding conversions so you can figure out which ads are getting the most conversions and why. It’s actually pretty complicated, but there’s a video at the official AdWords Blog that gives you a good overview.

Google has long been known for text-based CPC ads, but have been busy coming up with ad models based on these text ads. The new ad models are product listing ads, comparison ads, and ad extensions, which consist of sitelinks, product extensions, video extensions, location extensions, multiple addresses for location extensions, and click to call phone extensions. Let’s go through each of these.

Product Listing Ads are in limited beta release right now. They include more product info, like images, prices, and merchant names without requiring additional keywords or text. So when someone enters a search query relevant to something in your Google Merchant Center account, Google may or may not show the most relevant products with the associated price, product name, and image. These are only charged on a cost per action (CPA) basis, so you only have to pay when someone actually buys something from your site.

Comparison Ads are also in limited beta release. These let users compare several relevant offers and work on a cost per lead format. With these, the users do not have to fill in forms, and Comparison Ads doesn’t send advertisers any kind of personally identifiable user stats. Right now this is being used for the credit card and mortgage loan industries in select locations. Comparison ads should let advertisers target offers more accurately in order to get more leads.

The suite of Ad Extensions lets users make ads more relevant and more useful. They expand on the concept of standard text ads, letting viewers have the option of getting additional information right in the ad without leaving the search page. These extensions work with existing text ads without requiring changes to bids, ad text, or keywords. Following are the types of Ad Extensions offered.

Ad Sitelinks lets advertisers extend the possibilities for existing AdWords ads, providing links to specific content deeper within your site’s sitemap. So rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will offer up to four more destination URLs for potential customers to choose from. You can use ad sitelinks to direct visitors to specific parts of your site, such as promotions, store locators, and gift registries. Early users have reported improvements in clickthrough rates of up to 30%.

Product Extensions are in limited release and allow you to add more to your existing AdWords ads with specific product information on the merchandise you sell. It uses your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight products relevant to the user’s query. They can also show pictures, titles, and prices of products. In the first screen shot, you’ll see the “plus box” under the ad indicating the product extension. When a user clicks on that plus box, lots of products, along with thumbnail pictures show up, as you can see in the second screen shot. You’re charged the same CPC whether the user clicks on your main text ad or any offers in the product extensions box. But if a user  simply expands the box without clicking through to the site, you’re not charged.

Video Extensions are in limited beta release and allow you to engage prospective customers with video content. The video extensions are in an expandable plus box under the standard text ad. If the user watches the ad for 10 seconds or more, you’re charged based on your maximum cost per click bid of your text ad. After vieing the video, the user can click the URL link in the ad or go directly to your site with no extra charge to you. These are great for movie trailers and product usage instructions.

Location Extensions attach your business address to your ads. Your ad can also contain your business’s name, phone number, and address, promoting your business and its products and services with a specific location that’s of interest to the user. It’s good for drawing in local customers.

Multiple Addresses for Location Extensions, also in limited beta release displays a plus box under ads at the top of the page. Whenever a user clicks on that plus box, he or she sees a map that shows store locations near them, plus a search box for moving the map around. This feature shows as many stores as are relevant to a given search, increasing the chance of picking up local customers.

Click to Call Phone Extensions are for people searching for products and / or services from their smart mobile phone (like the iPhone, Android, or Palm Pre). This feature has been fully released. If someone finds your business on a search and would rather call you than visit your website, they can use a click to call phone extension they’ve found in ads on their mobile devices that have full internet browsing capability. You’re charged the same for a customer’s call as you would had they clicked on your website.

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Paying for irrelevant clicks in your pay per click (PPC) ad campaign is frustrating, but is there anything you can do to minimize the chances of this happening? Yes, in fact. Three of the biggies are the use of negative keywords, exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords have a major impact on your click-through rate (CTR) and therefore, your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). When you use the “phrase match” and “broad match” options setting up your AdWords campaigns, you should include negative keywords as well. It’s easy to do. Go to your AdWords account and click on the “Keywords” tab. You have the option of adding new keywords, as you can see in the screen shot. Notice at the bottom of the screen shot, how you can designate keywords as:

• negative keywords – don’t match this term: -keyword
• exact match – match exact term only: [keyword]
• phrase match – match exact phrase: “keyword phrase”
• broad match: keyword

Setting up negative keywords by placing a minus sign in front of them lets you filter out identical terms that can have very different meanings. For example, suppose you sell photographs of foxes (Work with me here, OK?). Well, if someone searches on fox photos thinking they’re going to get pictures from The Simpsons on Fox television network, you’ll be paying for their irrelevant clicks. Therefore, you want to use negative keywords like “television” and “network” to limit the number of times an ad for your photographs of foxes appears on a page when someone wants pictures from the TV network.

Judicious use of negative keywords can help improve the quality score of your keywords. A number of factors influence your keywords’ quality scores, including its general performance. Bottom line: a higher quality score makes your keyword trigger ads at a lower cost per click and positioned higher. Your CTR is the most important aspect of your quality score. A lot of “accidental” clicks on your ads can lower your click through rate. By using negative keywords, you’ll have fewer ad impressions, but fewer “false positive” clicks on your ads.

Finding the right negative keywords is a very important parts of a PPC campaign, but it can be complicated. One way to select negative keywords is to use your regular keyword research. The Google Keyword Tool will show you the keyword phrases that are more relevant and less relevant to your products and services. But relevance doesn’t always mean they match the searcher’s intent, and that’s what negative keywords help you with.

You’re not charged for negative keywords, and there isn’t a penalty for having a long list of negative keywords, so it’s worth your while to do some hard core keyword research and compile a list of negative keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign, so you’re not likely to use them all up. (Yahoo lets you have 250 negative key words and phrases, and Microsoft AdCenter limits you to 1024 characters worth of negative key words and phrases.)

Google’s Keyword Tool isn’t the only place that can help you come up with negative keywords. You can use server log files to find info on queries that lead people to your site. Heck, you can even use a thesaurus if that helps. Sometimes common sense helps you think up good negative keywords. Suppose, for example, your products and / or services are only available in certain geographic areas. You can use names of places your stuff isn’t available as negative keywords. For example, if you paint houses in Portland Maine, you don’t want to be paying for the clicks you might get from people in Portland, Oregon. Therefore, you can use “Oregon” as a negative keyword to keep out some irrelevant clicks. So the takeaway from this is that even though negative keywords will cause you to have fewer ad impressions, the CTR and quality score will go up, and so will your return on investment.

Exact Match

It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you want your ad to show up when someone searches on “baseball caps” but not on just baseball or just caps, then you specify your keyword in brackets when you choose your AdWords keywords: [baseball caps]

If you choose [baseball caps], your ads might show up when someone searches for baseball caps, but it will not show on searches like “baseball cap,” “blue baseball caps,” or “buy baseball caps.” Now, while this will cut down on the number of ad impressions, clicks, and conversions, those clicks you do get will likely be highly targeted toward your service.

Phrase Match

Suppose that you chose “baseball caps” as one of your keyword phrases for your ad campaign. Your ad is eligible to show up on searches such as “buy baseball caps,” “baseball caps giveaway,” or “green baseball caps.” They will not show up on searches like “caps for baseball,” “baseball cap,” or “baseball hats.”

This is a more targeted approach than a plain broad match, but it’s more flexible than exact match ([baseball caps]).

Broad Match

Broad match is the default option. If you used the phrase baseball caps with no bracketing, no quotation marks, no negative sign, your ad could show up on searches for “baseball,” “caps,” “baseball hats,” or “caps for baseball.” You’ll get more click throughs, but you’ll get more erroneous click throughs as well. Now it’s possible that someone will be searching the term “baseball” wanting to find certain statistics, click on your ad, and be smitten with it enough to buy one of your baseball caps.

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Guest Post by Alan K'necht

Over the past five to eight years, Search Engine Marketing (“SEM”) professionals have finally woken up to the reality that the goal of their campaigns, be it search engine optimization (“SEO”), pay per click (“ppc”) like Google Adwords or any other effort is not about driving the maximum number of eyeballs to a web site; it’s about conversions. Yes, the goal must be to drive quality traffic that converts on the site.

With the advances in web analytic products like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics (just to name a few of the more popular tools); the ability to assign conversions to specific marketing efforts has improved immensely and allow a the Search Engine Marketer and more importantly their clients the ability to properly evaluate their efforts. Through this effort campaigns can be more effectively optimized to maximize the return on the investments (“ROI”).
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Are you a Google affiliate publisher? If so and you haven’t logged into your account for a while, make sure you log in and select your payment preference in the Adsense dashboard or you might not get paid by your regular date.

Google announced this on the GAN blog today:

Affiliate publishers have new payment options through the integration with AdSense. As we head into the busy holiday season, please take a few minutes to check on the status of your payment preferences.

Publishers can view payments that have been posted to your AdSense account in the Google Affiliate Network platform; on the “Home” page click “Payments.” This view captures all payments and a detailed breakdown of your earnings per advertiser.

Payment information is stored in your AdSense account and Google lets you select your desired form of payment. Publishers can currently choose to be paid by electronic funds transfer, check, Western Union Quick Cash or Rapida. Check out the Help Center for a detailed overview your options.

Note if you see a message in your AdSense account prompting you to complete your payment information, it’s important you act quickly. This message means that there is some information missing in your payment profile and action is required to avoid payment delays.

Since Google integrated Adsense with Google Affiliate network there has been reports from a lot of users with difficulties in the transition, our recommendation is that you log into your account immediately and check for any system messages. If you have a problem, try emailing Google support first than try the GAN forum.

As you can see, there is a fair bit of user problems associated with the switch over in the forum. Hopefully Google will sort this out for their users soon.

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Our top tips to optimize your ecommerce for holiday seasons

The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.

You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.
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PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski

Identifying Areas of Improvement

Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter.  If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability.  There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.
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FTC announces guidelines for disclosures

What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.

In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;

Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF

Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF

A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .

While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.

Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.

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Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?

Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.

In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.

Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.

Case Scenario

My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.

Google Alerts

Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.

Google Alerts

This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;

• Google News
• Blogs
• Web Search results ( new SERPs )
• Videos
• Google Groups

Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.

Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.

• Campaign A for their brand name Super-Clear-A-Face.
• Campaign B for product related keywords : Acne Cream, acne treatment cream, pimple removal cream, acne gel.
• Campaign C for treatment , symptoms related keywords : Acne treatment, rid acne, cure acne, acne medication

Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases

Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.

Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.

I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.

You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.

If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.

I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.

As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )

In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.

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Great news for local sites in Thailand. You can now benefit from better targeted ads with Google’s announcement of its support for Thai in Adsense for Content. Last year, it was already included in the Adsense for Search program, so this just comes as the next logical move. Hopefully, other languages will soon follow. I’m all for localized content. Read the rest of this entry »

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From my experience, AdSense for Search churns out great CPM (at least in most cases, better than those for my AdSense for Content). The problem is that on average, very few people use the search feature on websites, translating into even fewer ad clicks. I’ve already written a post on how to try and boost your AdSense earnings, but here’s a few more little tweaks you can do, courtesy of Google’s AdSense blog. Read the rest of this entry »

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